1. Field
This disclosure relates to document device drivers, more particularly to generic document processing clients for networked printers.
2. Background
In a typical office environment, users have access to several different types of devices for processing documents across a network. The devices may include printers, fax machines with dedicated phone lines, network fax machines that fax across a network, such as the Internet, plotters, enterprise document management (EDM) systems and knowledge management systems, as examples. The documents discussed here may include text documents, images, drawings, spreadsheets among many other user-generated items that user desire to be processed. Similarly, processing of these documents may include faxing, printing, copying, converting to different formats, entry into EDM and knowledge management systems, among others.
Currently, document processing typically involves having a device specific driver on the user's workstation. The user desiring the processing will request the processing from within the document generation application that user is running. The document generation application hands the document off to the device-specific driver and the driver converts it into the appropriate format for that device.
For example, a user desires to print a document from Microsoft® Word®. The user selects File>Print from the pull-down menu or selects the printer icon from a toolbar. Word then accesses the driver for the default printer. The default printer has been previously designated by the user and the appropriate driver has been loaded and identified as the default driver. The driver then converts the document into a print data file and sends it to the printer. The print data file then enters the printer queue and when the printer reaches that point in the queue, the document is printed.
There are several undesirable issues with this type of application. For example, the user may want to designate another printer but does not have the appropriate driver installed. The user can easily designate another network printer but then has to wait while the appropriate driver is accessed. If the appropriate driver is not installed, the user then has to locate the driver and provide it to the workstation for installation.
A larger problem is management of networked printers. Every time a new printer is added to a network, each workstation that may need access to that printer must have the specific driver for that printer installed. In larger networks, this can be time consuming and tedious to install and track all of the various copies of the printer drivers.
The problem becomes even more problematic when several different varieties of printers are on the network. When several different types of networked document processing devices are available, each type having several different varieties, management of the drivers may become oppressive.
Therefore, it would be desirable for a generic, non-device-specific driver to be installed on each workstation for interfacing with several different kinds of networked document processing devices, as well as several different varieties of each type.